


a body of unknown stars

by corvidity



Series: Creating Constellations [2]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: (Duh it's Thanos), Alternate Universe, Angst, Body Modification, But Probably Not the AU You're Looking For, Cybernetics, Friendship, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-29
Updated: 2019-09-10
Packaged: 2020-01-31 05:54:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,290
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18585133
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/corvidity/pseuds/corvidity
Summary: After the events of Infinity War, Nebula gets the upgrade she wanted from Tony Stark. She also gets a friend, two robots, and more feelings than she knows what to do with.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is the sequel to _rust and stardust_ that I started almost a year ago, so all the events and characterisation here are based on my own post-IW speculation and have nothing to do with Endgame. 
> 
> Title from “The Ophelia Letters” by Rebecca Tamás:
>
>> He’ll speak me a way out of the dark,  
> some hidden tunnel or underpass  
> that I have to crawl through on my hands and knees.
>> 
>> When I come out, blinking, filthy,  
> I’ll finally have changed,  
> become a new and original universe,  
> a body of unknown stars

Earth is greener than Titan but no less miserable. The corpses of her father’s disposable army putrefy around the smoking remains of the Guardians’ ship, their combined stench heavy and suffocating. Beneath her hand, Stark’s pulse flickers weakly. Red stains the wrappings around his stomach.

The new arrivals – Stark’s Terran allies – descend upon them in a frantic wave of noise and hands. Nebula’s grip tightens. “I did not bring him back in one piece for you to break him again.”

“You needn’t worry,” one of the survivors tells her. A soldier, by the looks of him. “He’s in good hands now.”

Stark’s skin is ghostly pale and fragile as only flesh and blood can be. Nebula has no warmth to share; her body does not allow it.

“Hey,” he croaks. “I’m gonna be fine. We haven’t killed him yet, remember?”

The soldier watches as she lets go and allows them to take Stark away. When only they are left, he extends a hand. “Steve Rogers.”

“If he dies, Steve Rogers, you will not be far behind.”

Rogers considers her, crouched in the guts of her sister’s home. He looks as tired as she feels, the weight of a universe on his shoulders. “If he dies, so do the rest of us.”

 

 

Four days later, Stark wakes up.

Propped up in bed, he looks tired, marginally more well-rested than a corpse. The absence of the gaping wound that had almost claimed his life does not seem to have revived him any more than his dead friends.

“Guess I owe you one, huh.”

“For what?”

“I could’ve been very, very dead, but thanks to you, I’m just dead.”

Nebula scowls. “You’re not allowed to die yet, Stark. You and I have unfinished business.”

“Just restoring half the universe, sure. No big deal.” He exhales. “Just another day on the job.” His hands, flat on the crisp white hospital sheets, tremble. “Who else is here?”

He is asking for the names of people she doesn’t know or want to know. Connections in this post-apocalyptic landscape are meaningless. Running into Rocket and the force of his desperation had been more than enough. “Where are they?” he’d demanded, like she could summon his friends with a snap of her fingers. “Tell me they made it. Tell me that dumbass was too stupid to die.”

She’d stared at him. Saw how small he was, and smaller still when the silence stretched.

Stark twitches. “You will find out in time,” she says. Rocket’s face is etched in her databanks. All she can see in his eyes is grief, his and hers, magnified a thousand times over until she can barely stand it. Nebula wants no more part in it. She wants to crush it.

“Do you remember your offer, Stark?”

“Call me Tony. And yeah, I remember.”

“Good. Make me a weapon that can kill Thanos.”

His breathing hitches. But his fists curl in the sheets, sure and steady. “Alright. I can do that.”

 

 

Fourteen days after her father snapped the universe in two and disappeared into its depths, Nebula leaves Wakanda for New York City. In the end, she’d met a few of Stark’s allies and learned their names. Banner. Rogers. Romanoff. The Asgardian, Thor, who had lost his realms, his people and family. His gaze had been the heaviest when she spoke of her sister’s decision to take Thanos to Vormir. They each have their parts to play in the endgame, and she is glad Thor’s role will intersect only slightly with hers. She’d recognised his grief and anger, seen how it could kill Thanos as easily as himself.

The plane, like most other spaces post-snap, is uncomfortably large for her and Stark. Sitting beside the window, his hand strays every so often to the now-healed wound in his side. Wakandan technology had been more advanced than what she’d been given to understand of the planet. It probably won’t be the last thing about Terra to surprise her.

The world outside looks laughably whole, unbroken blue sprawling in every direction. Unfiltered sunlight bends the entire curvature of the sky into her vision, so bright she is forced to turn away.

 

 

The afternoon heat crawls along her names as they disembark. Stark, newly awoken by a none-too-gentle prod in the shoulder, goes tearing down the stairs, sprinting past her towards a red-haired woman on the edge of the airstrip.

They collide in a feverish, sobbing embrace; the woman clinging tightly to him as if afraid he will vanish. It feels like another private moment Nebula isn’t welcome to. Terrans – humans – are unnervingly open in their affection, in a way she never will be. But she wouldn’t begrudge Stark this.

“Nebula,” Stark, teary-eyed, gestures to the woman. “This is Pepper Potts, apple of my eye, love of my life, my sun and stars and moon and –”

“And you must be the one who brought him back to Earth. I can’t thank you enough.”

Potts’ smile is wide and open, her hand outstretched. The sun catches on her red hair and white dress, setting both alight against the sky’s blinding blue. Nebula’s world goes in and out of focus, soft and blurry but strangely warm. Smile softening, Potts lowers her hand and wraps it around Stark’s.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you.” She motions to the building behind her. “Shall we?”

 

 

The Avengers compound, despite Stark’s best efforts to pretend otherwise, is a large and echoing space that carries the same silence as the _Benatar._ The tiles gleam, absurdly reflective, her mirror image matching her step for step as Stark leads her to where she’ll be staying for the foreseeable future.

The room is small, modest and plain, surprisingly incongruous with the grandeur of the compound exterior and lobby. Natural light floods through the wall-length window, a far cry from the dark confines of her cell in the _Statesman._ The sun’s warmth presses on her back as she inspects the bed and dresser, untouched and picture perfect – a room she will mark, which will not mark her.

“If you need anything, give Friday a yell.”

“At your service, Miss Nebula,” issues a mellow female voice from the ceiling.

She even has intelligent company, of sorts, that isn’t a slavering, mindless Chitauri guard.

“Just make yourself at home.” Stark is already out the door, waving a hand at her to follow. “What’re you standing around for? We haven’t even gotten to the best part.”

 

 

Stark’s workshop has presence in the way the rest of the compound does not – from the scuffed table edges and haphazardly scattered tools to the cold cup of coffee on the table nearest the door. It reminds her, too much, of the _Benatar’_ s eccentricities.

The lights flicker on part by part as they walk in. Blue holographic screens spring to life, accompanied by a low, electrical hum. The AI’s voice surrounds them, modulated into something like relief and fondness.

“Welcome back, boss. Dummy and You are most eager to see you.”

From behind a high table there is whirring, soft and hesitant. To Nebula’s surprise, a robot emerges into the open. Its singular support strut moves – almost quizzically, if she had to put a word to it. A broom is clutched in its three-fingered claw. Compared to the technology on display, the robot looks ancient – obsolete, even, for non-Stark tech.

“Dummy!” Stark exclaims, affection so sharp it startles her. “What mischief have you been up to since I was gone?”

She’s barely registered his words before a new series of beeps and whirs has her spinning round, coming face to claw with a similarly built robot. This one speeds past her and straight to Stark, his face lit with a kind of joy Nebula can barely begin to parse. And are those tears?

“You! Steady, you’re going to knock me over. And no, Nebs there isn’t going to hurt you. She’s scarier than she looks.”

“Stark. You built these robots?” ‘Robots’ might be the wrong word, given how Stark treats them, chastising them for their behaviour. ‘Children’ would be more accurate. Would hurt more, too.

The first robot bumps its broom against Stark’s leg. “Let go of that,” he orders. “What did I tell you about cleaning up in here? Don’t. Sure, you want to be helpful, but every time you try, you break something. And then _I_ have to clean it up.”

“Dummy was quite insistent,” Friday offers.

Nebula stares at the puddle of congealed coffee on the ground. “For something that is meant to clean, it is not effective.”

“You hear that, Dummy? The blue lady thinks you don’t work hard enough.”

Nebula’s bewilderment increases tenfold. “You also named them… Dummy. And You.”

At the mention of their names, the robots perk up in unnervingly life-like fashion. Stark waves a dismissive hand. “What else was I going to call them? Mark I and Mark II?” He frowns. “Wait, I did do that, didn’t I?”

You approaches her, claw spinning and looking the furthest thing from threatening. It gives Nebula the strangest urge to laugh, even more so when the robot extends its claw in what might be charitably interpreted as an offer of a handshake.

“Looks like You’s taken to you already,” Stark remarks dryly. “Go on, he doesn’t bite.”

Their resemblance to children overwhelms her now. Whatever intelligence Stark programmed into them is no more advanced than a toddler’s, their bodies simple and frail. Neither see her as a threat, just a curiosity. In as much as they are capable of trust, they trust Stark, because he, for whatever reason, trusts her.

“I am not here to play.”

He sighs dramatically. “Fine. You, Dummy, this is Nebula. Like I said, she’s not scary at all.”

“I’m an assassin.”

“There you go. Full-time cyborg assassin, no different to a Care Bear. She’ll be staying with us for a while, so play nice.”

Nebula takes a step back from You. “They’d better not get in my way.”

Keeping others distant is all she has ever known to protect herself. Dummy and You whir softly in reply, claws opening and closing, the gears in their frames clicking over seamlessly like stars fading into daylight.

 

 

The days settle into a comfortable rhythm – they workshop her upgrades in the morning, while Stark dedicates his evenings to the construction of the gauntlet.

It takes her weeks to notice the box, wedged between two larger components and lost among the ocean of bric-a-bric native to Stark’s workbench if not for its distinctive blue glow.

“…and if you replace this part with carbon nanotube framing, we could – hey, you listening?” He tracks her gaze. “Oh, that old thing.”

Nebula points to the box. “There are words on it. _Proof that Tony Stark has a heart._ Why would you require proof? Were you born without one?”

Her first and only heart still beats strongly in her chest, augmented in parts but still the one she’d been born with, the one Thanos had moulded to his whims. She’d long ago learned to stop wondering why her father might’ve spared it, if it had been a rebuke or threat, that one day, if she failed him disastrously enough, he would tell her he had no other choice than to rip it out to make a final point – _your soft heart was always your undoing_.

Stark laughs darkly. “Depends who you ask. I wasn’t always Iron Man. Before all this, I manufactured weapons of mass destruction. Tanks, missiles, bombs; you wanted someone dead, Stark tech was your go-to. Everything I engineered was for death. And only a heartless man would create so much misery for profit, right?”

“But you stopped?”

“No thanks to myself.” His eyes skitter from hers. “I was badly injured in an explosion caused by one of my own missiles. That thing,” he points to the box, “that arc reactor, saved me. Or, well, a prototype of it.”

To Nebula, it looks as crude as Dummy and You. And yet it feels distinctly like Stark’s technology, shaped by his hands. She has already learned not to underestimate his creations.

From across the room, Dummy whirs at length. The container on Stark’s chest glows and dims. “Yeah, I know, buddy. You saved me too.”

Again, Nebula senses his armour drawing close around him. A great weight seems to settle atop her chest, and she says nothing more.

 

 

Thor is a regular visitor to the compound, his arrivals usually heralded by stormy, grey skies. But she rarely speaks to him, having no reason to – his visits are mainly to monitor the gauntlet’s progress and help test it where he can. When he isn’t around, he is out searching for the remnants of his people. The stories Thor brings back of a universe decimated by her father’s actions serve only to harden her resolve.

Her upgrades are moving along at Stark-patented speed, and there are few additions of his she objects to. But deep within her, she knows they are not enough. She needs more speed and stamina; she needs the power to face her father and kill him without hesitation.

“This arc reactor. I want one.”

“Say again? Was just too busy concentrating on this painstakingly thought-through design.”

“Not just the arc reactor, but the entire armour.”

“I _definitely_ didn’t catch any of that.”

“I believe Miss Nebula means she would like you to create her an exoskeleton.”

“Friday, stop taking sides.”

“The AI is partially correct. It is not an exoskeleton I want, but a fully integrated armour as part of my body.”  

Stark strips off his goggles, hair springing up in all directions. “You mean fused with it?” There’s a hint of darkness in his expression. “What’s brought this on?”  

“My body hasn’t met its limit yet, and there is nothing I will leave untried to kill Thanos. I saw what your armour did to him on Titan, Stark. If I had that, combined with my enhancements, he’d be powerless before me.”

“You also saw that I very much did not kill him.”

“Not for lack of trying. Don’t you understand? There is nothing I will not do to see him dead.”

“It’s not as if I want to see _you_ dead, either!”

Nebula’s bloodthirst subsides at his anguished outburst, remembering she is not the only one who has lost someone. Stark, however, is the only one who fears losing another. And for that person to be her? It makes about as much sense as half the universe turning to dust, an absurd reality that shouldn’t exist but does. Her life has never, does not, mean anything to anyone save her sister, and she’s dead now.

“You can’t kill me, Stark. You cannot heal or fix me either. I was broken long ago.”

She isn’t prepared for the look he gives her, so raw in its pain, that she feels an answering echo in her chest.

“I can’t,” he simply says, and stares at his hands. “I can’t do to you what I did to him.”

 _Him._ The child. “You did nothing to him. You were not the one who snapped his fingers.”

“But I could’ve done more. If I hadn’t… if I had –”

“Stark,” Nebula interrupts. “Tony. You are not Thanos.”

“No.” He laughs bitterly. “I’m just a man in a tin can who can’t even protect a kid. I made that armour for – for Peter. I wanted to keep him safe. If I couldn’t stop him running into a fight, then I had to give him something to win those fights. I just wasn’t expecting him to follow me into space and then get into a boxing match with our neighbourhood genocidal maniac.”

“I had to break the news to his aunt, you know. It was the first thing I did in Wakanda when I got Friday back online – dialled straight through to New York to tell her Peter wasn’t coming home. She yelled at me. Of course she did. No one wants to hear their kid died alone and afraid, on some godforsaken hellhole a thousand light years from home while the person who was supposed to look after them didn’t do a single thing.”

The workshop doesn’t have a clock, but Nebula can hear a distant ticking – it could be a malfunctioning auditory circuit as easily as the tremors of Stark’s, _Tony’s_ , heart. Mechanical or not, it beats steadily; unfailingly, disappointingly alive.

His oil-stained fingers curl in and out like the claws of his robot children. How can a man who built an armour that drew her father’s blood be so fragile?  

“I will not break. I am not a child anymore. Your – Peter,” the name comes haltingly, “was a boy. He did not understand who or what he was fighting, but he made his choice nonetheless. Foolish, yes. But not helpless. You merely sought to protect him from his own recklessness.”

Unconsciously, she touches her head, and the eye from which Thanos had forced her betrayal, the recording of her meeting with Gamora. “You forget that I am a weapon forged for my father’s use, to be discarded at his pleasure. I do not need your protection. I only need a weapon of my own. I only want to avenge my sister, just as you want to avenge Peter.”

Exhaustion and weariness hang on his pale face. For a moment, she wonders if she has mis-stepped, if a man who created two bumbling, childish robots and an armour to protect a boy might resist more violence. But she has guessed correctly.

“Alright.” He sighs. “I promised you, didn’t I?”  

 

 

Tony explains the whole process matter-of-factly, from how fixing her outer parts first will strengthen her body and give it the durability required to house the armour, to how he will inject the liquid variant of the armour directly into her body.

Nebula sees the pride he takes in developing it despite his earlier reluctance, the gleam in his scientist’s eye. Under other circumstances, perhaps, that delight would be whole and unblemished. But here there is a shadow of what she’d seen in other survivors, a determination born of guilt and grief, untameable as wild space.

He flicks a vial containing a silvery liquid that’s to be her armour. “I can’t guarantee it won’t hurt.”

“I know pain,” she replies, and he turns away.

 

 

The weeks pass, taking with them the old, abused parts of her body that Tony replaces. He never asks how Thanos did the same to her original limbs and organs; she suspects he doesn’t need to, not when he always asks, “does it hurt?” or “you okay?”

The people of Earth, or at least those she’s met, have a strong, bordering on irrational predilection for reassurance. It is a form of communication that shows they care for one another, a concept Thanos would have – _did –_ beat out of her.

 _As your father, all I want is your happiness,_ he would say. _And you cannot be happy when you constantly fear losing what you hold dear. So sever your attachments. Do not let them grow. This will protect you, my children. This is for your own good._

She wonders sometimes if Tony, in his tinkering, has inadvertently re-wired parts of her brain to… not care for him, but consider more than an ally. It isn’t that she fears attachment or the subsequent loss. They will part ways eventually, in victory or death. She’d known this from the beginning.

But it is frightening because Thanos had not built her for happiness, for the purpose of befriending others. A life without pain was impossible. A life where she was the beneficiary of another’s kindness unthinkable. Hers, from the beginning, had simply been a life without.

 

 

Nebula rarely sleeps, the biological need for it stripped from her long ago, but her brain holds enough synapses to dream – sometimes nightmares, white noise; other times, memories.

But this is new.

She stands on an alien surface, a rusted landscape of rolling dunes going as far as the eye can see. Her body tingles. Looking down, she watches her fingers crumble, dissolving into the ash that coated their hands on Titan. Her father’s mocking returns as an echo on the wind. _It would’ve been a waste of parts to kill you._

Around her, mounds of ash become mountains, black specks flurrying from the blood-red sky like a plague. Her arms vanish, her torso soon after. Each part of her body that vanishes is a lifted weight. The faster she falls apart, the younger she feels, liberation taking hold of her immaterial parts, pushing past the sands to the child she’d buried so long ago.

“Father,” she calls out, but not in fear. “Oh, dear father of mine. Look at what you’ve done.”

The voice on the wind sneers. “And what is that, my child?”

“You’ve raised the dead, father. I am coming for you. We all are.”

 

 

“You sure you’re ready for this?”

The only thing more smothering than Tony’s concern is the agitated whispering of the bots as they sweep their struts left to right. Their mechanical signatures shouldn’t carry as much emotion as she can discern. Thanos had never wanted his children to feel anything other than rage or fear.

“I am more than ready.”

The metal is cold at her back, the lights overhead glaringly bright. She remembers well the room Thanos most often used to rebuild and enhance her, its walls white and bare, a canvas onto which she could project her hatred and pain: hatred at him, herself, Gamora, the forces of the universe that had given her to a monster and made her one; the pain of knowing this and having no choice but to accept it.

The workshop walls pulse with Tony’s neon-blue diagrams, the colour cascading overhead briefly before he dims them with a flick of his wrist. A dark shape looms over her.

“I knew there was a reason I never wanted to go to med school.”

The needle enters painlessly at first. A heartbeat later, there is nothing but pain. Every cell in her body, every molecule, writhes at the sudden intrusion. She is burning without end or respite, white overtaking her vision.

_An arm, her severed arm, lying not five feet from her;_

_The new metal sparking, biting, misaligned circuits shocking her to tears she can’t cry;_

_Chips lodged in her brain, eyes gouged out and replaced, screaming herself hoarse until he took her throat too;_

_His unsmiling face, his dispassionate grimace as another leg snaps and twists, is wrenched from her body and the wound cauterised, her burning flesh all she can taste;_

_Don’t take my tongue, father, please don’t, please, please;_

_Searing pain, mute loneliness, calling voicelessly for Gamora, sister, why did you not let me die? Why couldn’t you have been a hero, a Guardian, until the end? Why did you choose me over the universe?_

“–bula! Nebula, look at me. Nebula. Nebula!”

It isn’t her voice, or her father’s for that matter.

It’s a frightened voice. Worried. Firm, too. Frightened of what? _For you,_ she realises. The fire grows, as does the pain. Her hand clenches reflexively. Bright lights blink into blurry existence, then reform into his hovering face. As she’d expected. It makes her want to laugh till she screams.

“Friday, stop the operation. Cut it to –”

“No.” Her voice is there; she has a voice. It’s all she needs. “No.” She forces her fingers closed. She’s endured worse. She will endure. Her hatred for Thanos, the pain she’s suffered – she claws it all from the white, sterile walls of her memory and into the surging fullness of her circuits and veins. “We are not stopping here. I will not allow it.”

 _Obey me_ , she wills the new, thorny presence in her body. _You are mine to command. I will kneel to no one in this universe_. _Not anymore._  

Everything she’s ever wanted, she will have. Everything she’s ever lost in the imbalance of her life, she will bring back, or failing that, avenge. She refuses to mourn like a king without his kingdom; she isn’t afraid of failing her family, she swallows the guilt of not having done enough for the dead. Earth isn’t hers to protect, and neither is the universe. She just wants her sister. She just wants her family.

Her heart shudders. The warmth in her hand spreads. Up her left arm and across her shoulders, down to her chest. She feels her hollow spaces filling up, the fire overtaking the cabling and wire Thanos had left as his legacy. The thrill that shoots through her touches every part of her new body – and it feels like a rebirth, an inevitability brought to its end, as if this was what she was always meant to be: whole and alive and free.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I'm back five months later, which seems to be a (terrible) habit with my fic. I've just been tired and things otherwise hectic, but I really did want to finish and post this properly, and give it the closure it, and you readers, deserve. 
> 
> And no, I haven't seen Endgame, but read enough spoilers to evict it from my Nebula-related headcanons.

Nothing in Nebula’s life had been given, and she shouldn’t have expected that learning to use her new armour would be any different. It refuses her call, or manifests in incomplete pieces that leave her frustrated and short-tempered. What she can summon does not do as she wishes. The force of _obey me_ had been enough to bend it to her will, but not enough to crush all resistance.

Tony sighs. “You can’t fight it, you know.”

“I’m not _fighting_ the armour.” Nebula scowls, feeling petulant. “Thanos modified me countless times using alien technology from every corner of the universe, and I mastered them all. It’s no different now.”

“It’s not just about the tech. Literally. The armour isn’t just nuts and bolts anymore; it’s an extension of your nervous system. Every last thought you have affects how it operates, so you need to get into the right mindset – that’s the point of it being intuitive. You think one thing, and allow the armour to do the rest.”

“Allow?” she echoes, incredulous.

Thanos had never given her that luxury. In this world, there is nothing but control. It drew the boundaries of her freedom, and now she in turn draws the lines. Her fist clenches, thoughts narrowing. From below her artificial skin she feels nanites bubbling up, forming into a gauntlet.

“ _I_ command this armour.” _I command my own body, for the first time in as long as I can remember._ Failure to do even this is not an option. Failure, she knows, means punishment – means her father’s cruel smile, his own clenched fist: “again, you disappoint me, _daughter._ ”

Only he could’ve had the audacity to murder her family and claim their place, then turn family into a cudgel he beat her into submission with.

“I don’t know how else to say this, but you _are_ the armour now. That’s why I said you can’t fight it – you’d be fighting yourself.”  

And just as quickly as the gauntlet materialised, it disappears.

Why is it, she wonders, that even when she’s escaped to a planet far from her father, and made a new body and armour, she cannot outrun his shadow? She’s still the deficient child, Thanos’ unfavoured, too slow and weak to prevent her body being taken from her part by part. She is still crying into the dark, _why am I not strong enough to win?_   

But what more is there of her to give? _What do you want? What more can you take, Thanos?_

“What Thanos did was wrong.” The hardness in Tony’s voice pulls her back to the workshop. “He physically forced his idea of improvement on you. He didn’t give you a choice. But this new armour? You chose this. You’ve made it yours. And that makes it different. That makes it a million times better.”

“Is it?” she retorts. It won’t be any different if she doesn’t master the armour in time.

“It already is.”

Tony points at her hand, and Nebula stares at the sky-blue gauntlet covering it.    

 

 

By convenience or design, Nebula slowly carves out her own space in the workshop where she can practice and adjust her armour as needed. Without realising it, her meagre belongings lend the space a homeliness she has never felt before – a chipped mug she’s taken to storing tools in, the yellow stress ball Tony had given her as a joke, a silver ballpoint pen she’s used so often it’s effectively hers.

The bots have taken to her increased presence in exactly the way she’d hoped they wouldn’t. Dummy and You now chirp a series of sounds that might be her name when she enters the workshop, and follow her around waving their arms animatedly. Friday translates the highlights for her, usually, “what are you testing today” and “let me help!”

“Are they not capable of learning when I say I do _not_ want their help?”

“It’s not that their protocol prevents them from learning, Miss Nebula. They simply choose not to listen.”

“And Tony programmed them this way?”

There is a pause. “That is my understanding.”

Something pokes the back of her leg. Nebula gives up.

“You want to help? Fine. Hold this and don’t move.”

Much later, Tony clatters into the workshop with a cup of coffee. “You’re all up hideously early, I see… Wait, why is Dummy holding a blowtorch?”

 

 

She knows it’s Dummy bumping into the back of her leg by the squeak of his wheels. He’s not as subtle as he thinks he is.

“Go annoy You, Dummy. I’m busy.”

Unsurprisingly, Dummy doesn’t budge. Their stubbornness is entirely their creator’s. “What does he want?” she calls to Friday.

“He has a loose wire.”

“Then call Tony.”

“I’m afraid he is otherwise engaged.”

She curses. _“Go away.”_

“Fixing the wire isn’t beyond your skillset,” Friday says. “I could talk you through it, if you’d like.”

Now she has a robot and AI on her case. “Fine,” Nebula grinds out. “Where’s the wire?” She’s fixed herself enough times to be confident she wouldn’t do irreparable damage to Dummy. If she wasn’t so irritated at her time being wasted, she’d question more closely why she’s indulging the robot in the first place.

It turns out to be more than just a loose wire, and twenty minutes later Nebula is wrist-deep in circuitry at Friday’s instructions wondering what series of events had lowered her to poking primitive machinery with such focus. It’s not as if she has anything to gain from this, isn’t she much better off practising with the –

“Nebula, be careful, that part –”

Just a slip of her fingers. Foreign code floods directly into her circuits, a rush of binary and data her machine brain processes quicker than her consciousness can keep up with. For a few precious seconds, she is not Nebula, the unloved daughter of Thanos; she is designation DUM-E, creator Tony Stark, and she wants to help.

Then she is back, thrust bodily into an eerily quiet workshop.

“Well,” Friday’s voice echoes, evidently relieved. “Looks as if you fixed it.”

In the silence, Nebula can hear her heart beating. Just for a moment, she had forgotten what anger or grief was, and how it felt to carry them. She’d never thought it possible to feel so light, or warm and wanted. Still a touch dazed, she pats Dummy’s strut.

 

 

In the weeks after, her control of the armour improves. It manifests more quickly and for longer, and causes her less pain to use. The only piece yet to manifest properly is her faceplate, but the rest she can practise with. It helps most when she remembers Dummy’s uncomplicated binary, the simplicity of his world. Her loss and anger and failure fade away, even if temporarily.

“Okay, I’ve fixed that feedback loop. Give it your second shot. Hole in one, c’mon.”

Nebula raises her arm and takes aim at the virtual target again. You chirps encouragement her way, which she acknowledges with a curt nod. The beam strikes true, triggering a loud ding and causing the target to flash red.

“Congratulations,” Friday offers. You and Dummy wave their arms.

“Yeah!” Tony raises his hand for a high-five. She hesitates. “C’mon,” he wheedles, and Nebula, buoyed by the success of the moment, meets his hand mid-way.

Then, for good measure, she touches the bots’ claws too.

 

 

One morning, Nebula finds a cup of cooled coffee on a workbench, its contents uncannily indistinguishable from machine oil. Knowing Tony, he would’ve poured himself a cup of oil and drunk it in his sleep-deprived state were it not for Friday. The man thinks himself a machine, able to function non-stop without rest.

She can respect his determination and drive, if not his lack of good sense. Not far from the cup lies a mess of wires. Above them hover Tony’s schematics for the gauntlet, flickering in the half-light of the workshop. Each infinity stone is rendered in painstaking detail, their colours pulsing almost like the real ones.

She finds Tony slumped on the ratty leather couch in an exhaustion-induced sleep, skin pale and blotchy from consecutive all-nighters.

“How long did he manage this time?” she asks.

“Sixty-four hours, thirty minutes and fifty seconds,” Friday informs her.

“Are you trying to kill yourself?” Nebula mutters. Well, from a certain point of view, he is. But he can’t kill himself in future if he does it now. “Friday, can’t you lock him out of the workshop?”

“Afraid not, Miss Nebula. Mr. Stark has access to all my override codes. I’ve tried telling him to sleep properly, though he never listens.”

She pauses a moment. “He listens to Pepper Potts.”  

Friday’s voice is wry. “Most of the time.”

“Then wake her.” Nebula makes to leave, then stops. “Friday, record her reaction when she finds him.”

The AI sounds entirely too delighted. “As you wish.”

 

 

It’s Nebula’s fault, really. She should’ve kept a closer eye on Dummy without Tony around. She should’ve known after the fifth time he tripped the sprinkler system trying to light a candle. A clearer mind would’ve known.

Hers has grown clouded with misplaced affection for a robot incapable of doing what it was programmed to do.

“Dummy,” she yells. _“DUMMY.”_

Dummy is making a beeline for the gauntlet and she is on the wrong side of the workshop. On instinct, she throws her arm out. _Stop him. Stop him._ From somewhere inside her, there is an answer. Blue metal surges up, enveloping her arm. Heat gathers in her palm.

_“Stop,”_ she roars.

Light pours over them, harsh and cutting. Someone is screaming, high and hurt. Apologising. _I’m sorry, father! I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to –!_

_…Stop him…_

_…Ne-bu-la?_

“Nebula? Nebula! Hey, you okay?”

His voice comes through strangely muted, and she shakes her head to clear it. Then, she remembers.

“Dummy!” She springs upright, casting her eyes around. He’s there, lying on his side, wheels in the air and strut dented, but otherwise in one piece. “You idiot,” she might be screaming. It’s hard to tell through her faceplate. “Are you trying to kill yourself? No, don’t answer that. I know.”

“Hey, hey.” Tony grabs her by the arm. “Calm down. Friday, what exactly happened?”

“I’m sorry, sir,” the AI says, contrite as only Tony’s creations can be. “I could not disable Dummy’s protocols in time as he made for the gauntlet. I have already reinforced the shields. Nebula’s intervention was able to avert the worst-case scenario.”

“Worst case?” Nebula pulls herself from Tony’s grasp. An unfamiliar fire races through her, not pain or rage, but something hotter than a dying sun. “This already _is_ the worst case, that your idiot robot lacks the programming to tell a gauntlet from a toy.”

Lying on his side, Dummy whirs apologetically. She hates – and hatred she knows, just not in this form – that the fire dims a fraction, cooled by relief.

“It’s okay.” Tony heaves a long, deep sigh. “It could’ve been a lot worse without you here.” He pats Dummy’s dented strut absently. “Don’t worry, buddy. It’s nothing I can’t fix.”

The robot’s gears click and rattle in a language Nebula doesn’t need to understand. Tony looks up at her kindly. Her so very human heart contracts.

“Thanks, Nebula.”

 

 

She progresses in leaps and bounds with the armour, after that. When her will is laser-focused and every breath she takes is balanced, when she and the armour are one, it feels as easy as clicking her fingers.

“Fri, initiate trial… what number are we up to again?”

“Trial 75, boss.”

“Right.” Tony checks on You and the camera position. “Trial 75 of rear thrusters. Nebs, you’re good to go.” He casts Dummy a dubious look. “And Dummy’s ready with the fire extinguisher, so don’t make a mess of it this time or he _will_ shoot.”

The armour slides into place smoothly and she takes up position in the testing field. Dummy ends up shooting her after all, foam spraying into her faceplate. You captures the entire sequence on video, and Tony laughs uproariously when they play it back.

It’s almost fun. It’s almost like a family. 

She tells herself this transient happiness is an illusion at best, a fantasy she indulges at worst. When Thanos replaced her limbs and organs with cold, dead metal, he did not remove her sentiment or the power to feel, understanding that anger, wild and sharp, was better fuel than a battery.

He’d known it was a gamble; feelings were double-edged knives, but he had considered himself too great of a manipulator to allow Nebula to ever master her own. As long as he fed her sense of inferiority, her blind rage and envy of her sister, she would pose no threat to him.

A mistake, she hoped, he would live to regret.

 

 

“You know,” Tony says one entirely too-early morning after another round of testing on the gauntlet, “I keep telling myself and anyone who asks that this thing will work. It just has to. There’s no Plan B.”

Even a genius like him has insecurities, she supposes. “Plan B,” Nebula says, “would be to play in front of Thanos the video of Potts dragging you back to your room. It would have him cowering in fear for his life.”

Tony groans. “I can’t believe you asked Friday to do that. And that Friday agreed.”

“It was a logical decision, boss.”

“You know what else I can’t believe?” He raises an eyebrow at her. “That you’re developing a sense of humour.”

Dummy and You chirrup, and he scowls. “Don’t encourage her!”

Nebula laughs, despite herself. The clock ticks over to 3am, and on cue, Friday dims the workshop lights. Without thinking it through, Nebula calls on her armour. In the darkness, its light is soft and silvery. The lightness in her own body expands in a way she can’t explain.

“Really living up to the name, huh?” Tony yawns. “I reckon you’re ready for a test drive one of these days.”

Nebula smirks, knowing he’ll see it. “I know I am.”

 

 

The morning dawns clear, air offensively balmy. Surrounded by readouts and data scrolling across her display, she doesn’t see Stark so much as sense him – the signature of his suit, the encryption of his frequency, the casual swagger of the man inside. One and the same.

Her thrusters power up with a rush, the repulsors in her hands coming to life at the same time. She’s airborne in seconds.

Flying had never been one of her favourite things to do; crashing was more her specialty. Most ships she’d flown had been less than ideal, little more than outdated, often dodgy engine parts held together by dumb luck and duct tape; all of it just clunking machinery rattling along the spaceways – empty shells piloted by an empty shell.

The _Benatar_ had been her sister’s ship as much as the Guardians’; hardly a dream to fly, but tangibly warmer, less a vehicle and more a home, a container large enough to hold their bodies in one cramped, chaotic space. The _Milano_ was the first time she’d ever thought a ship could be more than transport, the means to an end. The _Benatar_ was the second time, when she thought a ship could be a corpse, too.

But her armour is something else altogether.

Designed for and moulded to her body, responding to her thoughts, it _is_ her. It becomes her, is her body outside her body. The armour follows her movement, flows with her; she is the traveller and the means of travel, a body and not a cage.

It should be impossible to feel so light, so joyful, at simply being able to move unencumbered, without pain. Her whole being is freedom. With a single thought, she’s speed incarnate, covering kilometres in seconds. New York City comes apart and together in her cybernetic vision: buildings that unspool into a network of electrical cabling, the heat signatures of every living thing in them.

She’s not piloting or driving but flying, and even then, _flying_ cannot encompass the thrill of knowing where exactly her body is, and what she is doing with it. Tony’s sudden but not unwelcome laughter crackles over their shared comms. 

_“You’re doing great!”_

Buildings scream past; she moves around them by instinct alone, knowing the armour will respond. _Up,_ she thinks. _Higher._ The armour replies, _yes, yes, yes._

The urban thicket and half-empty buildings melt away as she streaks heavenward through what little clouds there are. Blue spreads across her vision, braves the horizon. The child in her dares to go further and further, beyond the sky to the stars from which she came. _Look at me now,_ she wants to yell, to scream as loudly as she can.

But it’s silent up here.

No one would hear her. Past the stars, where the blue bleeds into navy, there is nothing left.

The armour knows this, too; Nebula has stopped her upward trajectory. It’s the painless silence she’s longed for since she became Thanos’ daughter, yet something about it doesn’t feel right.

Words flash in the corner of her display. _Incoming message: Tony Stark._

_“Hey, all good? You were tearing up the bitumen there till you kinda stopped.”_

“It’s nothing.”

_“You sure? ‘Cause I’ve got a view I want you to see.”_

There’s a city below her, and in it the people (and bots) she has come to know.

_Then it’s time to head back,_ Nebula thinks. 

_Yes,_ her armour says.  

 

 

The mid-morning sun drums on her back as she makes her way to the bay, the nanites in her armour absorbing and storing every last drop. 

She senses Tony’s curiosity, the start of a longer question hovering in the air between them. Static crackles over her speakers. _“You okay?”_

Despite knowing he can’t see her expression, Nebula turns to face him. “I’m fine.”

_“Good.”_

They don’t need to exchange any more words.

Below them the ocean, like the sky, stretches from forever to what seems like eternity. Sunlight glances off the green waters. With her enhanced vision, she makes out moving shapes below the water, of fish and seabirds and drifting seaweed, even their shadows lively. For all Thanos’ effort, he hadn’t been able to strip the earth of its most important task, the one all living things carried in their DNA – to reproduce, to grow. To heal.

She’ll get her sister back. There is no room for failure.

When she does, she’ll show her this planet, this speck in the universe that reflects them in equal measure: the blue-green waters and grey glass, the whitecaps and foam spray; she'll show her its people and bots, and their kindness. It is not home, but the ghost of one, and what could’ve been. Maybe it will lay their grief to rest. Maybe it will scatter their past to the wind.

And they would sleep well, finally.


End file.
